Diagnostics is one of the most critical steps in health care and medical treatment. Specific protein detection is of great importance in this realm, since it is currently one of the predominant methods to diagnose the onset or progression of disease states. Unless specialized point-of-care assays are available for the protein of interest, quantitation is typically performed in a centralized laboratory by technicians. This process is expensive and could waste time that is critical to patient care.
Over the years, clinical approaches for point-of-care testing have addressed this challenge for select analytes, yet these assay formats are highly specialized to the particular target molecule, thus inflexible to apply to other targets. To keep pace with expectations in future point-of-care testing, there is a need for more flexible, yet highly sensitive, quantitative, and easy-to-use methods.